Associated Press A man screams for help minutes after a Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up in a main shopping area in the center of Jerusalem yesterday. The bombing killed at least two and wounded at least 42 people, seven seriously, police said.

LIMA, Peru - Peru's president vowed yesterday to use a "heavy hand" to put down terrorism in his country after a car bomb blast outside the U.S. Embassy killed nine people and raised fears of a comeback by the deadly Shining Path guerrilla movement.

Peruvian officials said the attack was timed ahead of a visit by President Bush to Lima this weekend. Bush dismissed the bombing by what he called "two-bit terrorists" and said he would go ahead with the visit.

No group took responsibility for Wednesday night's explosion, the worst terrorist attack in Peru in five years. But some U.S. officials and Peruvian counterinsurgency experts pointed to the Shining Path, a rebel movement that killed thousands in a campaign of bombings, assassinations and massacres until it was all but crushed in the 1990s.

President Alejandro Toledo left a U.N. conference in Monterrey, Mexico, a day early, telling leaders gathered there before he headed home: "The courageous Peruvian people will not allow terrorism to return in Peru."

"We will apply one heavy hand, and with the other the law. We will apply all the necessary firmness and all the weight of the law," he said. "I will not rest in this task, and I count on the support of you all."

The blast from an estimated 66 pounds of explosives shattered windows and wrecked nearby cars, leaving the upscale street in front of the U.S. Embassy strewn with bodies, including two policemen and an 18-year-old man wearing roller skates. No Americans were among the nine people confirmed dead.

"It's terrible. It looks as if we are returning to the terrorism we knew before," said 42-year-old Gonzalo Albin, who lives within three blocks of the explosion site. "Bush is coming Saturday. There's still time for them to do more."

Bush, who headed to Monterrey yesterday, is to meet Toledo and the leaders of Colombia, Bolivia and Ecuador in Lima on his first trip to South America since becoming president. He will also go to El Salvador during the trip.

"You know, two-bit terrorists aren't going to prevent me from doing what we need to do, and that is to promote our friendship in the hemisphere," Bush said in the Oval Office.

"We might have an idea" who set off the bomb, Bush said. "They've been around before." Bush did not identify the suspected group - but he nodded when a reporter asked if the Shining Path was on the upsurge.

A U.S. intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the bombing bore hallmarks of the Shining Path. A State Department official said the rebel group is the "likely suspect" in the attack.

Jhon Caro, a former director of Peru's anti-terrorism police, also the blamed the Shining Path, saying the attack was probably provoked by "Bush's declarations that he is going to fight against terrorism around the world."

During the 1980s and 1990s, the Maoist Shining Path terrorized Lima with a series of car bombings. At its height, the group numbered some 10,000 fighters. More than 30,000 people were killed in insurgencies led by the Shining Path and the much smaller and less deadly Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement.

But then-President Alberto Fujimori launched a tough crackdown, using secret military courts that drew international criticism but jailed hundreds of guerrillas - including Shining Path founder Abimael Guzman, who was captured in 1992 and is serving a life sentence.

The last Shining Path bombing in Lima was in 1997. The government says the movement still has about 500 combatants hiding out in the jungles of eastern Peru, and officials announced in December they had broken up efforts to form a Shining Path cell in the capital to plot bombing attacks, including against the U.S. Embassy.

Interior Minister Fernando Rospigliosi said the location of Wednesday's blast, near the embassy, was "a clear signal ... that it was an attack against the visit of Bush and against Peru's democracy." He said no theory has been ruled out as to who set off the blast.

The car bomb ripped through an open-air shopping mall of upscale stores, movie theaters and restaurants at about 10:45 p.m. Wednesday, but did not damage the fortress-like embassy, which is set far back from the street behind a high wall.

The street outside the embassy was littered with shards of glass, brick and charred car parts. The blast shattered windows in a nearby bank and hotel building and damaged at least 10 cars, including one that apparently contained the bomb. A small police truck was mangled, its hood peeled back and shredded.

"I saw a mutilated body to my right and another on a stairway on the other side," said Jose Victor Ortiz, 22, a business school student who lives nearby. "When I crouched down, I saw a policeman thrown down on the ground. He had glass encrusted in his cheek and his forehead and he was asking me to help him and that he couldn't feel his legs."